Kim Il Sung did not die alone. With him died, in infancy, hopes of some rapprochement between the two Koreas. Dead, too-or at least moribund-are expectations that Pyongyang and Washington might resolve their dicey dispute over North Korea’s refusal to allow full inspection of a nuclear plant that may already have yielded the makings of nuclear weapons.
Ironically, U.S. and North Korean negotiators had just begun negotiations in Geneva on Friday when the jolting news came: Kim, 82, had died of a heart attack. In an instant, the breathing space that former President Jimmy Carter had created by meeting Kim only last month was choked off.
Instead of having breathing space, the world must now hold its breath anew over North Korea. Will Kim’s son and designated successor, Kim Jong Il, 52, actually take power? Hold it? If so, what kind of leader will he be? How respected and obeyed at home? How flexible abroad?
Nobody knows. Nobody could know, because Kim Il Sung filled all the space-political and psychic-in Korea. To his people, he was George Washington, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Charles Lindbergh, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ernest Hemingway, all in one.
North Koreans genuinely revered him even though he kept them poor, allowed them no freedoms that we consider fundamental, and ran a closed police state whose communications media were dedicated to his grandeur, not his people’s enlightenment.
